


The Pond Princess and the Teeth of the Cookie Jar

by More_night



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Miriam Lass POV on Post-Wrath of the Lamb, reverse reverse reverse fairy tale?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 13:06:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7172945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miriam Lass wonders if Hannibal Lecter will treat Will Graham the way he treated her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pond Princess and the Teeth of the Cookie Jar

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of the wonderful project that first appeared as a lovely idea from [Hanni Bunny Lecter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/carrionofmywaywardson/pseuds/Hanni%20Bunny%20Lecter), which idea [damnslippyplanet](http://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/works) subsequently brought to life, the genesis of said bringing being exposed [here](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/145826975956/a-tale-of-two-murder-husbands). 
> 
> I'm the first to post their part, but there will be many to come in [the collection](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Of_Two_Murder_Husbands) (thanks go out to [mresundance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mresundance)!). Also, rejoice! 
> 
> Thanks to all the lovely fannibals for indulging my sometimes untimely questions on the chat thingy.

 

The sky was the same heavy white as when she had been taken in the psychiatric clinic. The building in itself seemed fine. The large doors were painted in a faded shade of pink that veered toward brown. The corridors’ floors were covered in worn gray carpets. It smelled of cooking and stale air, with an occasional draft of patchouli. Miriam Lass found the apartment marked 306, rang the doorbell and waited.

There were soft echoes of footsteps inside, locks being undone and the door opened. “Hey girl!” said the young black woman, all wide smile and breathing spirit. “How’s the real world?”

“Hi Mirelle,” Miriam said. “Same as before, I think.”

“Come on in, have a look around!” Mirelle showed her in. Her hair was tied up in a big bun over her head and she wore an oversized pale blue sweater. Miriam had met her at the clinic. Mirelle’s sister was hospitalized there with her. Her last suicide attempt had left her catatonic and every Monday Mirelle was there and read her the papers, or poetry, or excerpts from psychology journals.

Once, Mirelle had come in with a sore throat and couldn’t read out loud. Miriam had offered to do it for her. It was a paper on personality disorders. “You’re into this?” Miriam had asked her.

“Yeah. I’m a student at Johns Hopkins here.” Mirelle had told Miriam she hoped to be admitted to medical school next semester.

Miriam had smiled quietly. Words pressed against her lips, but it had taken a while before saying any of them. One day, Mirelle had said she was searching for a roommate. Miriam was checked out a month later, three days ago now.

“Your room’s through there.” Mirelle pointed a white wooden door. “You have the bigger windows.”

“You don’t mind?”

The younger woman shrugged. “I’ve got the tree outside.”

In Miriam’s mind, images flashed. A particular type of pine, short and thick. _A voice behind her. She couldn’t turn her head. “All its life was spent in the wind. Its trunk is angled, but its bark is much thicker.”_ On some days, she still thought this was the voice of Frederick Chilton.

Mirelle noticed Miriam’s focus slipping slightly and gripped her arm, enough to ground Miriam back in the tiny apartment on 28th Street, Baltimore. “Seriously, if you’re gonna do that every time I mention trees, we can switch rooms so you can stare those leaves in the face every morning.”

Miriam’s nervous smile broke into a laugh, hopeful, flying upward. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back. “No. No, that’s... Trees suck. It’s all yours.”

The kitchen was next. “You should know I make killer dumplings,” Mirelle mentioned, opening the slim bright green door that hid shelves with pasta, sugar, pots and pans, half of the space cleared for Miriam. She stopped mid-motion. “Was that a bad joke?”

“Yes,” Miriam approved. “Keep them coming.”

 

* * *

 

Miriam’s left arm bore a kind of tension. It was there when she grew tired, also there when she woke up, and also there whenever she walked in Jack Crawford’s office, like now. It was the same place she remembered, but it was as if the walls were brighter now than in her memory. All before Lecter had grown dimmer: childhood, school, first kiss – all crammed in an opaque fog. “No,” she said. “I mean, thank you. But no.”

Jack Crawford laced his fingers together on his desk. “You think you’re not ready,” he prompted.

“I can’t be ready for anything. My feet aren’t even steady,” she said.

He shook his head. “All your tests are clear. We’ve been running on part-time lecturers to fill Will Graham’s position for the last two semesters.”

“And if it’s someone who’s connected to Lecter, the students keep crowding the classes,” she jumped in. “I’m sorry, Guru. That was-...”

Lass was not a student, nor a trainee anymore. She was something more and something less than all that. And, still, Jack Crawford towered over her from behind his desk when he got up. “You’re not the best to teach this class,” he started. “But I know you. And it’s the best thing for you.” He took a file from a pile on his left and placed it in front of him. “Go pick up your students roll.”

Miriam listened to him and got up, swallowed, tried to see herself in front of the lecture hall where she had seen so many instructors, and couldn’t. Before she reached the glass door to Jack’s office, she said: “I still don’t remember a thing, you know? I mean, I remember things that I know don’t exist.”

“It’s better if you don’t remember.”

Miriam balled her right hand in a fist in the pocket of her jacket. Naturally, she thought, he had left her her right hand so she could shoot. She wasn’t Miriam Lass, she was a finger, a trigger, just a dead limb, living on a walking body. “What if I walk in here one day and shoot you?” she said.

Jack closed, then opened, then closed the file again. “You’d already have done that. Besides, Hannibal would want to kill me himself.”

She nodded. “Of course, I suppose he would.”

 

* * *

 

Her classroom had been alight with rumors of the Tooth Fairy since weeks. After the lecture ended, some students and trainees gathered before walking out. She heard them whisper the name of Will Graham. That he was here, in Maryland, in Quantico. She slipped her laptop in her bag and let them leave before clicking the lights off.

While she had demanded that her students take this occasion to see how media coverage could interfere or further analyses of cases from a criminal point of view, she had stayed away from the papers and the news. She had carefully avoided the silent, empty halls of the FBI where people would talk.  

But she did see Will Graham in the parking lot, that evening. He was making his way to his own car and he stopped when he saw her. She supposed she had changed slightly. Her hair was shorter, it stopped below her ears now and she knew she must have looked better, healthier, stronger, than when she was found, shivering in the empty pond at the bottom of the concrete tank.

She frowned and opened her mouth. There was a strange expression on Graham’s face. “You haven’t escaped,” he told her.

“Did you?” she said.

“We all escape from something, no matter where it comes from.” Then he ducked his head and turned away.

Miriam walked to her own car, slowly.

 

* * *

 

Two days later, Mirelle knocked on her door after midnight. “News is saying Hannibal Lecter escaped. They found Dolarhyde dead,” she said. In bed, Miriam froze, her breath caught in her chest, half-dreaming, she thought, as if her life had stopped again, like when she had pulled the trigger on Frederick Chilton, like it wasn’t her finger really. For a moment, she was tempted to stay under the covers and blankets, because any movement seemed too much. But when she got out, the cold air felt good.

“It’s on TV, right now,” Mirelle said, scooting to the living room, when Miriam opened the door.

They sat together in front of the screen. “I should have known,” Miriam said, after a time.

“What?”

“Graham was at Quantico, when I finished class a few days ago.” Miriam closed her thick white robe tighter around herself, keeping warm. “He looked weird.” On the screen, the camera showed Lecter’s house, from above, a helicopter probably, tiny amid the pine trees. “He didn’t say anything,” she lied.

“Weird like what?”

“Like a...” Miriam closed her eyes, recalling her exact impression, and how incongruous it had seemed at the time. “Like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. Not guilty, just... noticed, spotted.”

The screen now showed old footage of Dr. Lecter, wearing a fine smile and a tuxedo at the premiere of a Puccini at the Baltimore Opera. In retrospect, the media liked the pictures where he smiled best, the ones that showed teeth. Mirelle nodded toward the television. “That one cookie jar’s gonna eat his hand, though,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be in witness protection or something?”

Miriam shook her head. The fingers of her good hand felt twitchy at her side, those of her absent hand were cold, far away and heavy. “I’m not a witness to anything. Trial’s over.”

All night long, they watched the rumors change. At first, it was a prison break and Will Graham was a hostage of Francis Dolarhyde and Hannibal Lecter. Then, Graham had been working undercover with Lecter to trap Dolarhyde. By the time morning came, the news was even more oblique. The Bureau refused to comment on everything. Will Graham wasn’t mentioned. A blonde journalist told the viewers that Hannibal Lecter had escaped custody with the assistance of Francis Dolarhyde.

Names and faces danced before Miriam’s eyes. Places she hadn’t been, or so she thought. A house on the cliff, wind in her hair, the pebbles on the beach, wearing clothes that weren’t hers, the piano keys under her left hand. The sun reflected on the ball of a wine glass. The polished wood under her feet. Her memory kept pulsating, instead of going forward, as if distinct remembrances were stuttering, trying to piece a whole together and failing. The idea of a left hand was foreign now.

She had class that morning. She got dressed and couldn’t eat anything. She was leaving when the TV announced that sound evidence pointed toward the deaths of Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter and Francis Dolarhyde.

 

* * *

 

No one believed it initially. Tattlecrime presented it as the biggest FBI cover-up since the JFK assassination. The next day, Miriam didn't turn on her computer. She considered never again getting out of the apartment.

From that point on, every morning, when she got out, the surveillance car was there. On week days, it was black, sleek and shiny, a Hyundai. On weekends, it was an old Chevrolet, steel blue, with velvet on the seats. Mirelle offered them coffee on a Sunday morning.

And every night, Miriam dreamed of a strange face. She was walking on the street, revisiting places from her childhood and a stranger was always there, watching silently. Upon waking up, she had a feeling of deja vu, when she thought of the features of his face, alien yet known, tanned skin, hair a vague brown, paler than it should have been, angles in the face, soft jaw. After some time, it occurred to her that it was a mix of the faces of Hannibal Lecter and Frederick Chilton. But the eyes seemed far out there, unearthly. A bright blue. They were Will Graham’s.

Two months after the prison break, the persistent wind of gossip made it to her classroom.

At the back, two students whispered amongst themselves. “Ms. Cormick,” Miriam called out. “Something you want to share with the class?”

Allison Cormick’s head startled up, like a nervous animal, the trace of a giggle still curling her lips. “No, Ma’am. Sorry, Ma’am.”

Behind her eyelids, the face from her dreams winked at her. Miriam paused the slides. “What’s all the fuss about?”

“It’s... pretty stupid, Ma’am.”

“You’re reading Tattlecrime, aren’t you?” Cormick nodded. Beside her, her classmate ducked his head carefully behind his open laptop. Miriam let her voice rise to a booming sound that filled the class. “Please, update us. What’s Freddie Lounds’ latest?”

Cormick’s face was a bright red. She was doing everything she possibly could to disappear completely. “Nothing specific,” she muttered. The entire class had turned to her. “She thinks we... the FBI used Will Graham to... That Lecter liked him, so...” She cleared her throat. “She’s just... really, um, expanding on her murder husbands metaphor, Ma’am.”

A few chuckles and hushed words erupted, but the class settled down when they saw that Professor Lass was not smiling, but fidgeting with her pen, apparently lost in thought. After a few seconds, one student raised his hand. Miriam blinked a few times and nodded to him. “What do you think, Ma’am?”

Lass frowned and tried to focus. Never had the subject of her relation to Lecter as a victim come up in class – because students were afraid to ask, or because there was enough general, insubstantial knowledge about it as it was, circulating around the FBI, she couldn’t be sure. She had been glad, until then. “I...” She stiffened and exhaled carefully. “Up to now, I, or not just me, I guess, had hoped that Lecter hadn’t done to Graham what he’d done to me. That he hadn’t brainwashed him and turned him into a weapon.”

“Is that what happened to Will Graham?”

“It’s hard to explain what happened otherwise,” Miriam said. “And it’s what Lecter does. That’s what sociopathy does. People aren’t people… they’re steps to a goal, cogs in a machine. Just like a blade in his hand.”

 

* * *

 

She got home in a daze. She felt like the combined ghosts of Lecter, Chilton and Graham were in the back seat of her car. And every time she turned to look, of course there was nothing but her own fearful eyes in the mirror.

When she saw her, Mirelle quirked an eyebrow. “I’m making us the killer dumplings,” she said.

Miriam shook her head, hung her coat on the rack, all the motions empty. She did feel like the puppet of another will. “I’m not hungry,” she said.

“That’s because you’re all broken inside,” Mirelle said. “When you get back together, you’ll be hungry.”

In the kitchen, Miriam watched Mirelle mix the flour and the water, sticky, not too much, then shape the balls of dough, one by one, dip them into more flour, then compact them with the heel of her hand. Miriam watched her motions and, one word after the other, she told her about the classroom, Freddie Lounds’ newest thoughts, the stunned, nearly scared look on the students’ face.

“What do you think happened?” Mirelle asked.

Miriam toyed with a thin slice of green onion. “What do you mean what happened?”

Under the rolling pin, every pale sphere of dough became a flat round. “This guy, Will Graham. I thought he’d arrested Lecter,” Mirelle said.

“He had something to do with it,” Miriam recalled. These memories were clear, some of the clearest she had, all of her soul rushing toward the knowledge that Hannibal Lecter had been arrested. She never saw Lecter during that time, except once at the trial. He hadn’t noticed her at all, eyes closed behind the bulletproof glass cage. “Jack never told me how they’d managed it, exactly.”

“How do you go from arresting someone to being their friend?”

How had Miriam gone from feeling so warm and so good to sitting in stagnant water in a princess dress? “Friend’s not the right word for what Lecter does,” she said. “I just remember the places he took me. I mean some, not all.” Mirelle had her eyes on her work. The mushrooms, the cooked ground pork, the few shrimps, bursting and pink. “He made me into his weapon, to get at Jack Crawford, then to throw Frederick Chilton at him like a bone. I assume he made Will Graham into his puppet too. One that likes him.”

“How could he have done that from prison?”

“He did it before prison,” Miriam said. “The same ideas of peace that he implanted in my mind, he put in his. They stayed there all along, fostering. A prison inside.”

Mirelle’s eyebrow rose. She was closing the first dumpling, fingers sealing the dough around the filling like lips around a mouthful. “You think Graham knew that?”

“Yes, or no. Both can work. When they found me, I had no idea what my own voice sounded like. I didn’t recognize Lecter’s voice, nor his face, nothing. All I knew for certain was Dr. Chilton.”

“What would he be using Graham for?”

And suddenly it made sense. Francis Dolarhyde and all. “He needed him to kill for him. Needed his arms.”

The water had quietly come to a boil on the stove. The window was fogged with mist. “Like a sort of... tailored bodyguard?”

It was still hard to think of Will Graham. She had seen him briefly at the trial too. Mostly, she had seen him on the news. She had been there when they had found her and he had visited her after, but these memories had melted in a cloud. “Probably, yes,” Miriam whispered.

“So, if they’re not dead...” The first five dumplings went into the boiling water.

Miriam nodded slowly. She thought of how often she must have seen Hannibal Lecter cook. “He’s probably still with him.”

“Do you feel like you would’ve stayed?” Mirelle asked. “With him?”

“It’s not if I’d want to or not. All my other memories – of before – are fuzzy, like unreal.” Lecter had made himself be the only thing real to her, then he had removed himself from her mind, taking most of it with him.

“But you get that look sometimes, like cats that see birds through the window, like you’re seized or something...” Mirelle said, licking soy sauce from her thumb.

“The false memory of Dr. Chilton is the brightest, but there are others, not as strong. They have a kind of softness.”

“What do you remember?”

Miriam smiled and closed her eyes. “Glints of light on forks and spoons. Playing piano. Waking up from being unconscious.”

“Trees,” Mirelle filled in.

The blonde woman nodded. “They were some kind of pines. I never saw them anywhere else.”

“If that’s what Lecter’s doing with Graham, it doesn’t sound that bad,” Mirelle shrugged.

Holding out a large bowl, Miriam watched the dumplings be fetched out of the water, then set down in the plate. “It can’t be bad,” she said. “It’s the only thing there’ll be in his whole life. It’ll swallow everything else, until there’s nothing left.” She recalled the look on Graham’s face in the parking lot. “Probably already has.”

When Miriam looked up, Mirelle had frozen, one hand on the pot’s handle. “I didn’t mean to...” she said. Miriam blinked. Her eyes burned under her lashes and she realized she was crying. It tingled, like a surprise. Quickly, it changed into honest, tangible pain.

She shook her head. “I know,” she said and then she couldn’t keep the words in. “I thought it was a kindness. When they found me alive instead of dead, I thought it was better. That I was lucky.”

“Everyone thought that, baby girl, not just you.”

Miriam wiped her tears on the sleeve of her blouse. Her prosthetic arm was dead at her side, her amputated shoulder shaking slowly with the sobs that kept coming. “Still,” she said when it stopped. “I hope Graham’s dead. He probably isn’t.”

“Because he’d still, what, have some use?”

“Yes. I don’t know what for, but Lecter’ll find something.”

“Sounds lonely,” Mirelle said, looking down at the few dumplings cooling in the pot. “On Lecter’s part, I mean. Is he really making friends for himself?”

“He’s insane,” Miriam noted.

“You can be insane and lonely.”

“I suppose you can.”

 

* * *

 

It was already evening when they finished eating. Miriam was tired as if she had spent all of her mind and self. Like thread having uncoiled from the reel, it was now lying at her feet, mangled, used and shapeless. Alone, curled on her side in bed, hugging her left elbow against her chest, she thought about what she hadn’t told Mirelle, the truest thoughts that survived only in the dark. That she hoped Will Graham was suffering in the hands of Lecter now, just as she didn’t remember having suffered.

 

**Author's Note:**

> For updates on the postings, the collection and more murder husbandry, please check out [the heart of the tale on Tumblr](http://ataleoftwomurderhusbands.tumblr.com/).


End file.
